In brief: No single paragraph, but a series of arguments that one recognises again in the law in force. Caution is called for: recognising is not deriving. The parallels that follow are not claims about chains of influence, but invitations to see the same question asked twice – once in 1820 and once today.
The offender must not be a mere means
That punishment presupposes guilt and that the convicted person must not be made the object of other people’s purposes belongs to the core stock of German criminal law. Hegel’s formulation in § 100 note is older than the doctrine and concerns the same matter: the measure of punishment must be taken „from his deed itself“, and treating him „merely as a harmful animal that is to be rendered harmless“ withdraws from the offender the honour of being treated as a rational being. Whoever argues today about preventive detention, preventive criminal law or the law of dangerous persons is arguing about this sentence.
Only what one could know can bind
From § 132 – the „right of the subjective will“ that an action be imputed to it only „according to its knowledge of the value that the action has“ – two things follow in Hegel that lie far apart in present-day law: the doctrine of imputation (intent, mistake, guilt) and the duty to promulgate laws. § 215 derives publication expressly from § 132. Deriving the duty of promulgation and the principle of guilt from one principle is a construction one no longer sees in positive law – but it explains why both matter equally.
The sentencing range and what the judge has to decide
The soberest passage of the book, § 214 note, describes present-day sentencing before it existed: the legislator does not fix the final determinacy himself, „but rather leaves it to the judge to decide, limiting him only by a minimum and a maximum“ – and these limits are themselves merely round numbers. Hegel takes this not for a defect but for the only possible shape of the matter. Anyone who has ever written out the reasons for a sentence knows the experience that the last step can no longer be argued.
Publicity and lay participation
The publicity of the administration of justice is grounded in § 224 not on control of the judiciary but on the right of consciousness: the universal content of the case – the right within it – concerns „the interest of all“. And § 228 requires that the party be able to trust those deciding, resting on „the equality of the party with them, according to their particularity“ – Hegel’s argument for trial by jury. Both thoughts stand to this day behind the publicity of the main hearing and the participation of lay judges.
Protection of personality against one’s own contract
§ 66 determines what one cannot effectively give away even by one’s own will: „my personality as such, my universal freedom of will, ethical life, and religion“. That is the structure with which every legal order works that lets contracts fail on self-surrender – from the immorality of lifelong ties to the non-waivability of fundamental-rights positions. Hegel’s grounding is the more interesting one: it is not a prohibition from outside that makes such contracts void, but the contradiction that I, as a person, would dispose of that through which I am able to dispose at all.
Poverty as a product, not a misfortune
§ 241–§ 245 are the passages at which the book is least at rest. The production of the rabble is for Hegel no accident of operation but a consequence of the system itself, and he ends with an admission that no economist of his day would have formulated:
It becomes evident, here, that, in the face of the excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough – that is, does not possess enough, of its own peculiar resources, to check the excess of poverty and the production of the rabble.
Groundlines, § 245
That the state must answer for securing subsistence, and that poverty is a legal and not merely a charitable problem, belongs today to the principle of the social state. The road there does not run straight through Hegel – but the diagnosis is in him, and it stands there without a solution.
Self-administration and associations
The corporation of § 250–§ 256 is the place where Hegel gives the individual a third belonging between market and state: estate, cooperative, self-administration. Chambers, guilds, social-insurance bodies and functional self-administration in general can be described better with this concept than with the alternative of state and private autonomy – and are so described in the science of administrative law to this day.
And the caution at the end
None of this is a proof. The law in force came about by way of Kant, natural law, the historical school, the Pandectists, the Imperial Justice Office and a hundred and fifty years of case law; Hegel’s share in it is contested, and where it is named it is often mediated through intermediaries whose Hegelianism is more asserted than shown. What can be shown is more modest and more useful in practice: a series of questions which the law in force answers without still asking them are asked expressly in the Groundlines. One can test one’s own answer against them.
Sources. Groundlines § 66 (the inalienable), § 100 note and § 101 (punishment), § 132 (right of the subjective will), § 214 note (judicial discretion), § 215 (promulgation), § 224 (publicity), § 228 (juries), § 241–§ 245 (poverty and the rabble), § 250–§ 256 (the corporation). – On the history of Hegel’s influence and its ruptures, including the appropriation of Hegel by legal doctrine after 1933: Hegel and German legal scholarship.